To baldly go

Lib Dem MP Mark Oaten has blamed his dramatic midlife crisis on having suddenly lost his hair. His reaction may have been a little extreme, writes Nicholas Lezard, but the loss of a man's crowning glory is rarely a laughing matter

The news that Mark Oaten blames his baldness for his midlife crisis is certainly parting the nation's opinion neatly down the middle. There are some who feel that losing one's hair is hardly an excuse to inaugurate a same-sex relationship behind one's wife's back at around the same time as one is running for the leadership of one of the country's major political parties.

On the other hand, there are those men whose reaction to the bad news of their baldness would differ from Oaten's only in the details. Maybe not a rent boy, and maybe not the Lib Dems - but, on the whole, they can see where he is coming from.

There are men, and I am one of them, who fear baldness the way some people fear the apocalypse. Luckily, however, I am in the unusual position of having arrested, or at least slowed down, my impending baldness by sheer force of will. About 12 years ago I noticed a lot more of my hairs going down the plughole than I was comfortable with. I started gauging my scalp's advance against a two-year-old photo of myself. There was a freckle right at the border of the hairline: now there was a clear centimetre and a half of skin. Things were moving fast. Too fast.

It was appalling news: like being told you had an inoperable and grave disease, but without any opportunities to be heroic in the face of it. When they notice you are going bald, people do not tenderly clasp your hand and ask you if there is anything, anything they can do to help: they laugh a bit, or recoil in faint distaste.

Anyway, by frowning a lot, and simply not getting out of bed for six months, I more or less halted the process in its tracks; and in case things go wrong again, as it looks like they probably will soon, I've let my sideburns grow so that people's attention is momentarily diverted. But while my bald friends would hardly consider me one of their fraternity, I feel their pain. (Or fear their pain. Of course, all this fear can make your hair fall out, so I don't give in to it too much.)

Baldness is a curse that demands all the fortitude at one's disposal. It is a curse not only because it looks as though something biblical has happened to your head - it is also the way it is seen as comical, both as a fact, and as an occasion for comical reaction. The Moabites, reckless high-livers who made too many incursions into Israeli territory in the Old Testament, were afflicted, according to Jeremiah, by baldness. At one point Elisha is mocked by children ("There came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head"). Later God sends a couple of she-bears from the woods and they tear 42 of the Moabites to pieces.

That, according to my bald friend James, is about right; and given that I, in my foolish youth, would happily tease both my housemaster (nickname: "Skull") and my father to the point of tears, it is a wonder that I have not been ripped apart by bears.

It is a long time since I have mocked the bald, of course. It is simply not nice. (Unless, of course, you are Steve Bell - who has, incidentally, more hair than he knows what to do with - and have Silvio Berlusconi as a legitimate political target.) One correspondent of mine puts it like this: "I would say my confidence has roughly halved from when my head was lush. And if I'm having a good day, all it takes is a glimpse of myself in a mirror to bring my self-esteem crashing down again."

One mystery, on the face of it, is why it is that men should be so dismayed by the condition. It is, after all, hardly uncommon. But ubiquity doesn't mean popularity. Everyone dies, and hardly anyone is wild about that. It may be because of its intimations of mortality: baldness is a kind of little death, at the very least of the last visible link to one's youth; and the revealed contours of the cranium can, glimpsed unexpectedly, give rise to the most morbid of speculations. But thoughts of one's death can also, so to speak, put a kind of grim lead in one's pencil. Certainly, many bald men have tried to stress a link between their condition and that of increased sexual potency, although this does not mean, and should not mean, wearing a T-shirt that proclaims, "It's not a bald patch, it's a solar panel for a sex machine", which bespeaks not only true desperation but a connivance with the end of a belief in one's own dignity.

I was going to ask another friend, Alex (not his real name), if the caving-in of self-confidence that attends baldness had driven him to stray from the marital bed, but as he has done so, to my knowledge, about 236 times, I thought I'd save myself the bother. It certainly hasn't stopped him from getting laid, but as to whether it propelled his priapism, or somehow managed to put the brakes on what might otherwise have been en even more impressive figure, I am not sure, and it may be impertinent to ask. But he does say that there is not a day when he does not wish to have his hair back; his most heartbreaking dreams are the ones in which he is once again hirsute.

There are those who can and do carry baldness off, to a greater or lesser degree. William Hague's example is interesting. Although a Tory, and therefore flatly undeserving of our sympathy, he managed to carry off his baldness with a certain weary bonhomie, acknowledging himself as the butt of a not hugely amusing joke, and privately consoling himself, we presume, in the tender embraces of his wife, the lovely Ffion. Not, you notice, those of a male prostitute several years younger than himself. He must have impressive internal resources.

Another baldie-who-copes is Patrick Stewart, who played Star Trek's Jean-Luc Picard with one of the most gleaming pates ever seen on television. Stewart managed to carry it off, partly because of his natural and hard-earned authority as a starship captain, and also because in real life he had been playing Shakespearean heroes since the year dot. He drove a surprising number of women wild, or wild-ish, and indeed I do know a couple of women who claim to find bald men attractive.

Why? I asked. The answers, it has to be said, revolved alarmingly close around a focal point which could tentatively be labelled "father-figure-related issues". Still, it's nice to know that there's someone out there for everyone. (In the spirit of fearless research, I asked my wife if she would still fancy me if I was bald. There was a disconcertingly long silence. "Well," she said eventually, and with an unsettlingly telling choice of words, "that's the thing about being married; you have to take the rough with the smooth." No, in other words.)

In the end, as in the circumstances of one's preferred death, it all boils down to dignity, and how much can be mustered in the face of fate's great insult. It is hard enough these days for men to achieve or retain this quality; and as long as memories persist of Benny Hill slapping the little baldie on the top of his head for laughs ("I saw a repeat of that the other day," another bald friend told me. "I couldn't believe they allowed it to be shown. It was so insensitive. I nearly fainted") this is going to be a hard one for men whose hair has died and gone to heaven. At least the comb-over has been relegated to the dustbin of history; and, with a bit of luck, the Berlusconi weave will suffer the same fate. There is a gunky, vaguely hair-like substance you can actually spray on to your head, as used by (names withheld on legal advice), but that's not far off using a marker pen for the same effect. It won't wash. (Or, rather, it will: right off your pate.) And all that Elton John's massive investment over the years in illusory hair has done is, weirdly, to emphasise his baldness in a manner which, paradoxically, mere baldness could never have done. Such are the risks.

All we can offer the bald is a promise that we should try and understand and respect the shame and despair they are feeling, and not tease them about it, or the aberrant behaviour it drives them to, for a second. Unless, of course, they are Silvio Berlusconi. Or Phil Collins.